Arc Raiders features a distinctive soundscape built from unusual recordings, including a music sample created from a piano found in Chernobyl’s Forbidden Zone. According to the game’s developers, someone entered the area and produced a sample library from the old instrument, which the team later purchased and used in the game.
The game’s relatively quiet environments leave room for details such as distant gunfire, roaming ARC machines and the sound of raiders searching abandoned buildings. Instruments discovered among the rubble also contribute to the atmosphere and serve practical gameplay purposes: players can use their sounds to interact with others or lure ARC enemies into traps and distractions.
One early gameplay idea involved giving players a trumpet. The concept was eventually replaced by the lure grenade, but the game later added several playable instruments, including the piano, guitar, harmonica, flute, banjo, recorder and shaker.
The developers said composers Patrik Andrén and Johan Söderqvist have spent almost seven years exploring the game’s world. Their backgrounds as performing musicians also give them connections with Swedish jazz musicians, helping create distinctive sound libraries for Arc Raiders.
The team has used more than traditional instruments. Alongside raw synthesizers for ARC-related sounds, the composers have connected different fruits to a synthesizer to produce stranger effects. Söderqvist explained that a three-hour recording session may result in only around three minutes of usable material, but those short sections can provide sounds that would be difficult to obtain in any other way.
Sources: PC Gamer.